Seven Little Known Birds of the Inner Eye. Mulk Raj Anand

19. The Hunter (Catalan Landscape) by Joan Miro 20. Ugly Masks—-Man and Woman by Rabindranath Tagore 21. Movement of Bullocks by Feliks Topolski 22. Number 1 by Jackson Pollock 23. The Tantras, India 24. Minotauromachy by Pablo Picasso 25. Primitivist idea 26. Brahmin with tuftknot 27. Primitive thalamus 28. Thalamus bird 29. Thalamus bird in brain 30. Sending messages 31. Birds dimly roused 32. Rhythm bird 33. Yoga pose 34. Rhythm bird flies off 35. Engraving by Krishna Reddy 36. Dialectic situation 37. Chakras 38. Six plexuses 39. Buddhist architectural forms 40. Krishna's nervous reactions 41. Union of hearts 42. The heart bird 43. Heartbeat of cat 44. Cosmic Egg 45, Symbol of Shiva, India 46. Incarnation of Vishnu 47. Mont Sainte-Victoire by Paul Cezanne 48. Two-headed bird of reason 49. Brain as lotus 50. Helpless without instincts 51. Reticular formations 52. Brain coordinates responses 53. Bird of reason 54. Phoenix bird 55. Flight of seven birds 56. Indian cave drawings 57. Actor's Mask by Paul Klee 58. Hot Pursuit by Paul Klee 59. Hunt area in primitive drawing 60. The Dying Princess, Ajanta cave painting 61. Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci 62. Landscape attributed to Ma Yuan 63. Portrait of the Artist by Harmensz van Rijn Rembrandt 64. Panel (3) by Wassily Kandinsky 65. Composition in White, Black and Red by Piet Mondrian 66. Guernica by Pablo Picasso 67. Person Throwing a Stone at a Bird by Joan Miro 68. Threading Light by Mark Tobey 69. Birds by Gaitonde 70. Feeding the chicks

      Preface

      AS A YOUNG student of philosophy in London in 1925, I was much preoccupied with the problem of perception. All the old ideas were in question. And I found that the psychology of perception was adopting revolutionary hypotheses, outdating most of the 19th-century concepts under the influence of scientific investigation. Lord Russell's reductio ad obsurdum of every percept to "sensation," based on sense data, held sway in philosophical discussion; and Clive Bell's "aesthetic emotion," to be derived from "significant form," were the slogans of the English art world. Of course, in ordinary life, in the museums and art galleries, the impact of the new analysis had not been registered. But I felt that most people, including myself, looked at paintings and sculptures but did not see them.

      So in 1926 I began to do research, under the guidance of Professor Spearman in the psychological laboratory at University College, London, on the reactions of all kinds of people to works of art. I "exposed" 200 men and women intellectuals—doctors, nurses, technicians and students from the Slade School of Art—to reproductions of Leonardo's Last Supper, a Rembrandt Self-Portrait, The Dying Princess from Ajanta and other important pictures. The results seemed to confirm my idea that people saw pictures either as illustrations or as decorations, but very seldom as perceptions-apperceptions.

      I heard my own professor's